Even Peter Thiel went mental!
Healthcare and Mental health are a big topic in our life, accelerated by Covid this has only increased. This week we’re gonna look into Mental health startups that are disrupting this field.
As you may notice you haven’t received The Next newsletter over the last month. My father lost the painful battle to cancer, and as you would guess I took some time off. He was an amazing father and a great man, and we’re truly gonna miss him.
In this edition
Psychedelics based mental illness treatments
27% growth in plant-based meat sales
Singapore on its way to becoming the World's next food hub
An unexpected side effect of the tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic is an unprecedented opportunity for innovation in mental health care. In this newsletter, we’re going to look into the latest trend in mental health, psychedelics-based mental health medicines.
Startups in this field:
MindShift Compounds - A Swiss based psychedelic drug discovery company that develops psychedelic compounds for mental health illnesses.
MindMed - MindMed is a psychedelic biotech company developing medicines and therapies to address addiction and mental illness. MindMed started trading at the NASDAQ just 2 weeks ago.
Atai - Atai Life Sciences is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company aiming to transform the treatment of mental health disorders. Backed by billionaire Peter Thiel, ATAI filed its SEC paperwork this week and outlined its plans to take its portfolio of experimental psychedelic medicines to Nasdaq.
Market size
With an expected growth of $65 Billion, this market is becoming a new vertical for investors such as Peter Thiel.
Psychedelic-Inspired Medicines
Atai, Mindshift, and Mind Medicine’s current interest is to treat mental illnesses — depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia, to name a few — with psychedelics. The way they plan to achieve this is by extracting psilocybin from magic mushrooms.
How does it work
Psychedelics or better known as Magic mushrooms contain a substance called Psilocybin. When taken, it converts in your body to Psilocin. Psilocin in your body acts like serotonin and we all know what serotonin does for us. It's the key hormone that stabilizes our mood, feelings of well-being, and happiness. We all love Serotonin!
With this being said you can’t just go randomly eat magic mushrooms, you need microdoses and a program tailored for your body. These startups take out the compound you need so you can take it in pill form without the usual psychedelic side effects.
Using magic mushrooms may sound questionable mainly due to the party drug image. But we looked into all the trial phases and the majority of the outcomes look promising, in some cases where people who had drug-resistant depression were cured in a period of just 6 months.
Plant-based food worth $7B in 2020, posting 27% growth
Considering that plant-based food sales have been on an upward trajectory for the last several years, coming in at $5 billion in sales in 2019, the segment's sales growth was certainly expected. But growth in 2020 took a steep upward turn, with sales figures climbing more than twice as fast as the 11% growth the segment saw in both 2019 and 2018.
The biggest winner in terms of sales gains was plant-based meat. While traditional meat also saw large sales growth in 2020, plant-based meat doubled. It's becoming much more of a force in the meat section, with 18% of all households purchasing it — up from 14% in 2019, SPINS found. Plant-based meat has a high repeat rate, with 63% of consumers purchasing it multiple times.
Singapore
Last week, The Spoon published an interesting article exploring the idea of moving to Singapore to experience the latest in food tech innovation. According to the article, “if you want to experience the future of food today, Singapore is the place to be.”
From funding opportunities to forward-looking regulatory frameworks, Singapore has become a leader in the future of food field and likely will be the first site of Asian expansion for many future food companies.
Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, Temasek Holdings, has also invested in many companies leading the future of food, including Memphis Meats, Eat Just, Perfect Day, and Impossible Foods.
From vision to reality, Singapore’s journey to becoming a foodtech hub for cellular agriculture and the wider future food sector is a lesson many places can learn from.
The Next newsletter will be about energy! better said energy grids and battery tech.
As most of you know, we’re already using a lot of energy for our current devices (phone, tablet, home electronics, Alexa, e-scooter, and e-everything). With the uprising of the EV this usage will be more. We need to charge these devices, while doing this the question arises of how much our current energy grid can handle this growing need? Next to the question around grids, and other questions arises which is - can the world meet the ever-growing need for batteries and the raw materials to produce batteries. We’re gonna dive into these 2 subjects.
What we read
Every investor should be aware that investments in private companies are particularly risky and may result in total loss of invested capital. Past performance of a security or a company does not guarantee future results or returns. I do not recommend any companies for investment, endorse their fitness for investment or verify or claim the accuracy of information provided by such companies. No part of the work carried out by me is intended to constitute financial advice.
I bought mind medicine stock a couple of weeks ago. Now, feeling more to hold that stock after reading your post.